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Hey, I'm a partisan, but I must say I'm more snippy toward and irritated by certain groups of supporters and certain individuals than I am by the candidates themselves. In fact, the pattern I seem to be following is more one of having the tactics of certain supporters inform me of the proclivities of the various candidates.
Where to start, where to start...
Okay, well let's start here: I'm an Edwards partisan and have been since shortly before I started posting on this board. (He really crossed my radar in a big way when he went after Ashcroft in the confirmation hearings, and when I realized he was entertaining a run for the presidency, I started tuning in more to see if I liked the rest. This was in early '01.) I started posting on this board around May of '01 (although my profile says differently for some reason) and was fairly consistently a partisan for him from that point on.
Deanies drove me nuts initially; the worst of the bunch were absolutely vehement about their guy and used ridicule and the massive weight of the majority to hammer their point home. Never mind the gaffes and the deception about other candidates' tax-cut votes, they were adamant. His slash-and-burn tactics bugged me, and he was quite a bit too conservative for my taste (regardless of how he was mis-labeled by the media) and I became convinced early on that his recklessness rendered him unelectable. The summer and fall of '03 were relentless, and I started to become more irritated with him, especially with his distortions of the others. He's done a terrific job as party chief, though, and his 50 state strategy was an unsung endeavor that helped win in '06. He's loose and a bit wild, but that's part of his charm. He's more valuable than many realize.
Annoying though the Deanies were, they paled in comparison to the worst of the Clarkies, and since the Clark camp had a particular and specific antipathy for Edwards, all sorts of trouble ensued. It still continues, and to this day, those who are most vehemently pro-Clark are the most difficult of any partisans on the board. Remember: Edwards had virtually no supporters on this board during the '03 and '04 season, while Clark's were, if not the largest group, the most vocal. It was truly amazing to read the aghast spluttering of the Deanies one Saturday evening in '03 when the Clarkies burst onto the board in full stride. The Dean supporters were shocked to hear the same ham-handed ridicule and bandwidth trampling they'd used used against them. The bludgeoning tactics like accusing people of "whining" and other dismissive ridicule that's reminiscent of conservatives' intolerance was a shock to them. This all colored my opinion on Clark--who I still say has a lot going for him--and certain of his actions did too. He was very coy on past beliefs and affiliations, rewrote the past about vouchers, IWR support, Bush foreign policy support and played fast and loose about the records of others. When he lied about Edwards' and Kerry's votes against the Bush tax cuts, I turned a serious corner and have yet to hear anything that mitigates that repetition of a bad lie that Dean got caught using earlier. Although a couple of Clark supporters have expressed dismay or remorse about this, the vast group of the extremist supporters avoid, deny or counter with unrelated accusations to muddy the waters. The beat goes on.
I don't much like Hillary Clinton because she's far too corporatist for me. Sorry if that sounds like a wrote dismissal, but it's true: Bill dragged this country way too far to the right--although he did many good things--and the legacy is not good. I'm a liberal. I'm not a progressive, which I consider to be a term used mostly by people cowed by the right's ridicule of the term "liberal". She's very good at saving her ammunition, but will she really ever fire? I don't believe so. She's not a mean person or an ultra-conservative, she's just too much beholden to corporate interests and still a bit too much of the "Goldwater Girl" she was in 1964. Some of her supporters are tiresome in the snotty lording-it-over-the-losers way of the people on the biggest bandwagon, but there are relatively few who really get under my skin. Of her most annoying stalwarts, they still aren't too irritating; more than anything else, I just wonder what their true motives are. Is it because they really want a woman president and she's got a chance? (Some, sure.) Is it because they love Bill Clinton--and, to be fair, her too--and want to rub the reactionaries' noses in it by electing her in the face of the seething hatred from the trogs? (More do than I'll bet would admit it or even know it.) Is it because they really LOVE her policies? (That's tough to believe; she's so middle of the road on so much that there are candidates more "for" each bit of policy than she is.) In the end, I don't trust her enough and don't think she'll really stand up for anything. She's so accustomed to jockeying for position that that's become her end as well as her means. Perhaps I'm wrong. Still, she bugs me quite a bit but I don't have much trouble with her supporters. The big problem is this: I don't think she has a chance in hell of being elected, and I'm terrified we're going to get Mondaled by a short primary season just like we did in 1984.
The extremists among the Obama camp sound more and more like the Deanies of old, just as Obama himself acts like a more polished and restrained version of Dean in that campaign. He makes vague, sweeping generalizations and then backpedals, denies what he said, rephrases, blames his subordinates and huffs with some kind of smiling-and-contained disdain for being questioned. I don't like the money he's taken from big medicine incorporated, and he seems not only calculated but sloppy. The supporters are a mixed bag, with many coming off as the zealots of the Dean or Clark stripe, but hardly any are as bad as the worst of either. There are also MANY who are embarrassed by the missteps and have the decency to say so. At this point, I like his supporters (extremely varied group that that is) more than I like him. His performance tonight was at once cocky and disingenuous. He has this almost Stalinist view of history: if he says something enough, it can erase what he's said before. To hear him whittle down the issue about Musharraf, one would think that in his recent speeches he's mentioned "working with Musharraf" over and over and over and over and only once did he allude to an instance where he'd tweak Musharraf by a mere military incursion into his territory. He was careful, over and over, to refer to the "mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan" rather than the "battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan", and he didn't get called out on it. There's something very slippery here, and It's got my proverbial goat. Still, I think he's somewhat more "progressive" than Hillary, and I don't think he's as much in the pocket of the corporate power brokers, even though he is to a degree. Then again, that kind of thing takes time, and he's still the new kid on the block. I think he's basically decent enough and would make a better president than a candidate, but the verity issue is still there. I also think he's going to learn from his mistakes, although if he gets more good press out of what I thought was a VERY sloppy performance today, he may not. There's something very much like Bill Clinton in his makeup in an odd way: he likes to "get away with it."
Kucinich supporters have always been an honorable lot, and only occasionally get sanctimonious. Dennis was MIGHTY full of himself tonight, and that kind of bravado is not really his strong suit, but hell, he's got a right to think well of himself: he's a supremely decent person and has been on the right side of just about everything. He's too far to the left for me on enough things and he doesn't have a chance in hell of being elected, but he's got a great future ahead of him and I wish him well.
The Gore supporters annoy me, but they're not nasty sorts. I don't necessarily think he'd be the best candidate, but he could definitely win. There's a revenge issue at play here much as there is among the Clinton supporters, but it's justified.
There aren't that many supporters of the other candidates who stand out, and none of these groups has gotten under my skin to this point, so my dander's just fine when it comes to these.
I wish more people would be more forthcoming about this kind of stuff, and although I don't want to toot my horn too much from the moral highground here, I do think it's only fair to the group to admit this stuff and be candid. Most of us want much the same thing in the long run, and for all the personality quirks and all, most here are quite decent sorts.
What's tiresome is that people won't admit that they're wrong and won't admit when their candidate does something wrong. There was one very telling post this week from someone who just "wanted to be on the winning side for once"; what was annoying about this is that this is how we get the bandwagon idiocy like Kerry benefited from and it looks like Clinton or Obama might.
That people will fight like tigers to deny what their candidate said or didn't say speaks volumes: so many people are so terrified of ever being wrong that they'll deny the water as they sink under it from the collision with the iceberg that wasn't there. The personal ego-need to be "correct" and "not wrong like every other so-and-so" is an astonishing characteristic, and it sounds like that's why you started this thread. Hope you're a quick reader, hope you take this with the spirit with which it was intended, and I'll try to practice what I preach. I've criticized my champion for quite a few mis-steps and blunders, much as those who have me in their cross-hairs will dispute this and take me to task for it.
There's a great line in the movie "Patton" (directed by Franklin Shaffner and written by Edmund North and none other than Francis Ford Coppola) where Patton has a nice moment with Omar Bradley explaining his ongoing tiff with Bernard Montgomery:
Patton: Hell, Brad, I know I'm a prima-donna; the thing I hate about Montgomery is he won't ADMIT it.
It'll be interesting to see how this thread works out.
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